KEY POINTS:
Regulate in haste, repent at leisure. In the wake of something like Folole Muliaga's death, the natural reaction is to want to ensure it never happens again. But a coroner has yet to establish what "it" was.
It is one thing for the public to rush to judgment.
It is less edifying for the media to do so. And it is downright dangerous for the Government to join the stampede.
Because these are exactly the circumstances when badly thought-out and burdensome regulations get imposed, of the kind that the quality regulations task force launched by Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel a year ago is seeking to roll back.
The risk is that we end up with a perverse outcome - imposing costs on power companies which drive up their prices and push more people into the position where they struggle to pay their electricity bills.
Those bills having been climbing. Since the move to a market model for the sector began in 1993, residential electricity prices have risen by an average 3 per cent a year in real terms, that is, over and above the rate of general inflation.
Two factors seem to have been behind that. One is the unwinding of historical cross-subsidies from commercial to residential consumers which grew up in the days of local body control.
The other has been the adjustment to the depletion of the Maui gas field, which has long been a source of absurdly cheap fuel for the electricity generation.
But while retail prices for consumers have been rising, so have incomes. The result is that the proportion of the average household income spent on domestic fuel and power has remained pretty steady around 3 per cent.
After its recent reweighting, electricity represents 3.3 per cent of the consumers price index, compared with 2.7 per cent in 2002 and 3 per cent in 1998.
The trouble with averages is that they can mask wide variations.
If Graeme Hart walks into a bar, the average net worth of the bar's patrons shoots up but that does not mean the rest of them are suddenly in a position to shout the bar.
So we cannot on the strength of that 3 per cent of average outgoings figure say "yeah right" when a body like Grey Power talks of elderly people going to bed early because they cannot afford to keep the heater on.
It would be nice to think the years of relentlessly rising power prices are all behind us but worse is to come.
The adjustment to life after Maui and the rebalancing of commercial and residential tariffs may have largely run their course.
But ahead of us lie emissions trading, major upgrades of the national grid and, unless more natural gas is found pretty soon, either liquefied natural gas (LNG) or huge investment in renewables.
The electricity sector may well be the first cab off the rank when emissions trading is introduced.
At this stage, we can only guess at what the impact on retail electricity prices will be. It depends on the design of the scheme and where carbon prices go.
But some modelling by the Law and Economics Consulting group puts the impact between 0.4 and 1.2c a kilowatt/hour.
Replacing great chunks of the ageing transmission grid will cost a pretty penny too. And unless new domestic gas fields are discovered in the next few years, Genesis and Contact are likely to need to invest in facilities to import LNG for their gas-fired power stations. In addition to the capital costs involved, that raises the prospects that the marginal generators that set wholesale electricity prices will be running on a fuel whose price is linked to world oil prices and subject to exchange rate swings.
All of this raises the stakes when it comes to the regulatory environment around disconnections. It means the proportion of consumers who struggle to pay their power bills may well go up.
And the last thing they need is measures that will add to compliance costs and the incidence of free-loading, both of which would increase electricity charges.
The existing guidelines covering such things are voluntary but are to become, in effect, mandatory by being backed by the threat of formal regulation.
They contain provisions for low-income consumers, with additional provisions for those who are vulnerable through health or disability issues.
Low-income consumers are those whose low incomes, whether temporary or permanent, make it genuinely difficult for them to pay their power bill. It is not intended to cover defaulters who just don't intend to pay.
The guidelines lay out alternatives to standard billing that retailers should offer.
They include smoothed payments (designed to ensure minimal variation from one bill to the next and allowing arrears to be recovered over time), automatic payments, prepay meters and bonds.
But sometimes, the guidelines concede, disconnection may be the only feasible option.
In those cases, electricity retailers should (soon to be must) make reasonable efforts to contact consumers, including phoning outside normal working hours.
And they should (soon to be must) advise consumers of available assistance from government and social agencies.
But the companies can't share personal information about their customers with those agencies without the customers' agreement.
The guidelines assume the companies can tell the difference between those genuinely struggling and those deliberately seeking to avoid paying.
And there is an all-purpose out clause: "Retailers should not be exposed to unreasonable credit risk."
For the special class of "vulnerable" consumers, as the guidelines stand, the onus is on consumers who consider they would face excessive hardship if their power were cut off to identify themselves to their power company. The onus is on the company to inform all consumers how to do that.
The company, if dubious, can require verification from a third party such as a GP - but only with the consumer's permission.
Vulnerable consumers are to specify someone like a family member, friend or social agency that the retailer has to contact before they can be disconnected.
But who counts as vulnerable? The guidelines only speak of "health or disability issues".
The Prime Minister last week sketched a longer list: the ill, the frail elderly, families with young children.
It seems further consultation is to be undertaken on this point.
But the more inclusive the list, the greater the risk people will seek to abuse it, and the more suspicious and hardnosed the companies will become in response to that.
From a power company's point of view, disconnections and reconnections cost money.
They are an expense they should seek to minimise. But bad debtors cost money too.
The danger is that the Government uses the companies as a mechanism for income redistribution from those who pay their power bills to those genuinely can't afford to - and to those who can game the system.
